Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link compared to a number of total users who view a web page, an email, an advertisement, or any other electronically provided content. CTR is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular content associated with different websites as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.
A web page may include links to articles, videos and other information. These links may be embedded in or presented as images displayed throughout a web page. An image is commonly used to serve as an embedded link, which may direct users to the provided content (e.g., an article, a web page, a video or other related information). For example, a web page may include multiple images (or other media elements such as a Graphical Interchange Format (GIF) or GIF lite, which are configured to arouse the viewers' curiosity. When a user clicks on an image, the host server (e.g., server hosting the website) may direct the user to the content related to the image (e.g., a different web page). Alternatively, a website may display a frame from a video (e.g., thumbnail) as a representation of the video. When a user clicks on the thumbnail, the host server displays the full video to the users (e.g., on the website). In existing and conventional methods, the media element (e.g., image, GIF, GIF lite or the thumbnail) is manually selected by an editor, which may be random or based on different biases and subjective preferences of the editor. For example, the editor may choose the first frame of a video to be displayed as thumbnail. The editor may also select an image to represent a news article or other web content.
These conventional methods and solutions have created several shortcomings and technical challenges that are specific to website design and website content optimization. The images selected by a user (even if relevant to the content) may not be the most suitable or desired by the website viewers. For example, what the editor has selected may not necessarily increase the CTR of the content. Furthermore, conventional methods do not provide a dynamic display of multiple media elements for the same content. For example, the selected image (by the editor) may not change once the website is published/rendered. Thus, a bad selection by the editor may have a negative impact on the marketing and advertising of the content provided on the website and may result in a decreased CTR. Furthermore, since the selected media element may not change after publication, the negative impacts may be further expanded and exasperated. As a result, the existing and conventional methods do not guarantee that the media element selected by the editor is the best option to optimize the CTR.